Bonjour, Las Vegas!

Laurent Soliveres, executive chef at Guy Savoy Paris who plans to commute between Vegas and Paris, had been here training the kitchen staff. Executive chef Damien Dulas, Savoy's chef de cuisine from the Paris flagship, and chef de cuisine Adam Sobel, a young American who has worked most recently at Bradley Ogden at Caesars Palace, seemed in good command of the kitchen.

Savoy's son Franck and Franck's wife, Laura, head the front of the house, Franck as general manager and Laura as manager of the private dining rooms.

Despite the location at Caesars Palace, where a coterie of centurions and a Roman senator stroll regally around the pool with Cleopatra, Savoy's restaurant feels a world apart from the Strip.

After the training lunch, Savoy took in the view through the picture window next to the table. "In every form of perfection, there's a bit of surrealism," he mused. "Look," he said, "there's the Eiffel Tower!" That's, of course, the kitschy replica of the Parisian landmark across the Strip at the Paris Hotel and Casino.

For Savoy, the surreal is part of the fun. Among the art still to arrive was a bust of a polar bear constructed of matchsticks, by the Scottish artist David Mach. He planned to hang that over the fireplace in the Champagne lounge.

And the fun appears on the table too. The Laguiole knives have bright, almost fluorescent red handles. Dishes have hidden chambers; there's always something to lift up to find a surprise. Finish the Hawaiian monchong with shaved green and violet asparagus and sabayon zinged with sherry vinegar and waiters appear. With perfect choreography, they remove the false bottom of the plate, revealing asparagus soup garnished with a morsel of roasted monchong.

Though Guy Savoy Las Vegas is designed as the Paris restaurant's twin, there's a twist here: Savoy and his chefs will use as many American products as possible as they replicate dishes from the original. The monchong -- a Hawaiian pomfret -- replaces \o7bar\f7, a Mediterranean sea bass. The Santa Barbara spot prawns, which the chefs had only discovered on Thursday, would stand in for langoustines. For the oysters in ice gelee -- a layer of oyster cream, a single oyster, and an oyster gelee served in the oyster's shell -- Savoy sought an oyster with an assertive flavor; Mecox Bay oysters from Long Island did the trick.